System Management Features

This section describes the system management features in this release. These new features enable you to configure services with seamless configuration management, automate configuration enforcements across systems, and also provide secure, remote administrative access.

Resource Capping Daemon

The resource capping daemon provides a simplified configuration, more responsive rcapd performance, and more effective cap enforcement. The command options have been simplified, and the interface for the rcapd administrative utility rcapadm(1M) has been updated. A more efficient method of selecting available memory pages for use in rcapd operations has been introduced to improve system performance.

Two rcapadm parameters, sample and mode, now enable administrators to control all rcapd operations. In addition, functionality to address unenforced memory caps is now available. If a collection of processes is found to be over its memory cap for an extended period of time, rcapd determines whether memory caps should continue to be enforced for that collection. If a memory cap is no longer enforced, rcapd logs a detailed error message reporting the cause.

REST-based Administrative Interfaces With RAD

Oracle Solaris 11.3 includes a new set of remote administration daemon (RAD) modules that provide support for administering ZFS, IPS, datalinks and flow management, and AI servers. RAD provides administrators with programmatic access to system configuration through a set of interfaces that include C, Java, and Python.

Oracle Solaris 11.3 adds preliminary support for developing REpresentational State Transfer (REST) based APIs by using RAD. Developers can now add REST interfaces in addition to standard interfaces such as C, Python, and Java when developing RAD modules for various system components.

Improved Device Management

You can use the diskinfo command to display information about different types of devices and their topology on a system with a common /dev/chassis path. This command has been enhanced to include NVM Express (NVMe) and Sun Flash Accelerator PCIe devices.

For example, the following output shows enumeration of SAS internal storage, NVMe and USB devices:

Periodic and Scheduled Services

SMF provides the ability to define and configure services to run on a specific schedule, in addition to the capability to run the services periodically. This capability provides similar functionality to a cron entry but with additional SMF advantages such as built-in dependencies management and simplified life-cycle management. A scheduled service can now be delivered in an IPS package, configured, enabled, and removed from the scheduling list together with all the components of the service, making it very easy to deploy.

Multi-CPU Binding for Oracle Solaris Projects

Multi-CPU Binding (MCB) for projects enables you to control the MCB of an Oracle Solaris project by using the existing control utilities projmod(1M) and project(4). For other resources that are controlled by a project, you can modify the MCB of a project as an attribute of the project.

Hiera

Hiera is a lookup tool for viewing configuration data. When Hiera is used in conjunction with Puppet, Hiera keeps site-specific data out of Puppet manifests, which enables you to use more generic manifests for multiple systems. Puppet classes request any data the classes need, and the Hiera data acts as a site-wide configuration file. Configuration data in Hiera can be in YAML or JSON formats. Oracle Solaris 11.3 has been updated to include Puppet 3.6.2.

USB FMA

Oracle Solaris 11.3 includes the USB FMA hardened feature that makes USB client drivers fault-management capable. New USB FMA faults have been defined for both hardware and software failures which enables more software and hardware errors to be captured, diagnosed, and documented.